Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

The hope that the Civil War amendments carried—that the states would enact the same principles of freedom that the federal laws demanded—proved to be a fiction. When the Democrats regained power in Congress and the Republicans lost interest, the former Confederate states set upon a scheme of permanent disenfranchisement for Blacks, reversing the gains of Reconstruction and punishing those who dared treat Black citizenship as whole and real. At the core of this seizure and denial of rights lay a devious scheme of passing the buck. Federal laws granted rights in theory but left to the states the responsibility of implementation. States took full advantage of this, perfecting their craft by invoking the Tenth Amendment, the last addition to the Bill of Rights, which granted to the states an independence from responsibility to those who lived within its borders. Heralded as “states’ rights” to all who would listen, the Tenth Amendment became an unscalable barrier against civil rights for millions. In the former Confederate and sympathizing states, slavery may have ended, but nothing bound the white men in charge from imposing new forms of degradation on the Black Americans who continued to live there, in the areas they’d known their entire lives. At the onset of the Post-Reconstruction era in 1877, the infamous Jim Crow laws took hold when rights granted by Reconstruction were swiftly taken away. The eleven Confederate states plus two sympathizer states that formed the core of...